Guides I've read on here suggest stacking mastery to achieve block of 40% and dodge/parry at 25% combined, so I reforged early gear into mastery. However, now I'm well over the 40% block yet I'm below soft caps on expertise and hit. I'm not concerned about hit too much but would it ever be OK to reforge mastery into expertise to reach soft caps? The next upgrades I'm due = more mastery/avoidance but not threat stats. Even glyphed I've struggled in Cata to get expertise in my beginner's gear.

I'd like to join the "I have no problems with threat" gang but in reality low latency and middle aged reactions mean my threat ain't that hot against heroic geared players. In previous expansions I've compensated for my dotage by gearing for threat.

Would this be foolish now and should I just keep stacking mastery up to 50%+?

When you get to your gear level, it is quite ok to start building a "threat set" for 5 mans which caps hit and soft caps expertise. It's low cost as you now won't get many drops from heroics and will start to run out of things to spend JPs on. And when you start to outgear heroics, the importance of gearing for survival starts to diminish and working on threat my keep the run smoother.

That said, it's probably a minor benefit - even capping threat, I do low dps in 5-mans: it's not like end of wotlk when I could compete with decent dps. And I tried tanking Deadmines in my threat set, but promptly switched back to my survival gear, tail between my legs, after I dropped dead to those two tough ogres early on.

For your main gear set, however, I would keep pushing mastery and reforge out of, not into, threat. The block cap is 102.4% and our holy shield does not contribute to that in any way. I think you may be relying on something you read in the past when it could contribute 30% or something. You'll need a block of 70%+, not 40%, to hit that cap. And you probably won't reach that until you are in full 359 geared for mastery.

Last time I ran Heroic DM, the DPS said that the cannon did no damage to the two big ogre body guards just before the boss.

It has been a while since I've run H DM but it sounds like it could be a LoS issue. If it really has been nerfed, the can be stunned and with a 6 second stun and short CDs you should be able to get a least one down through your CDs alone assuming you have dps that belong in a heroic.

Discus wrote:Guides I've read on here suggest stacking mastery to achieve block of 40% and dodge/parry at 25% combined, so I reforged early gear into mastery.

I think whatever guide you read was outdated, or you misinterpreted the suggestion. Block of 40% and dodge/parry combined at 25% (along with health of maybe 130k) is a good suggestion for someone wanting to start heroics. But once you're gearing up in heroics you need more, so you'll be ready to raid.

There's never a need to reforge mastery, until we reach the block cap using mastery exclusively from gear. We're a long way away.

I think whatever guide you read was outdated, or you misinterpreted the suggestion. Block of 40% and dodge/parry combined at 25% (along with health of maybe 130k) is a good suggestion for someone wanting to start heroics. But once you're gearing up in heroics you need more, so you'll be ready to raid.

Yes, I should have qualified - what I'd read was a prior to start running heroics suggestion. I overgear heroics I know, but post-4.0 PUGs are so abusive in my realm that the only way to silence them to is to overgear/outplay them. I've only run a couple of heroics so far and my initial surprise was just how gently the trash and especially the bosses hit. I expected far worse. The only slight issue I had was holding threat on bunches of mobs. Survival was not an issue at all, even with undergeared healers.

I'm aware that unhittable is unobtainable currently and more mastery = good. However, my threat stats are low and getting lower as I upgrade, yet the dps I run with are getting ever more powerful.

My expertise has since fallen to 17 (with SoT) and it does feel low tbh. It will be a long long time, if at all, before I raid in Cataclysm. Like many casual players, raiding has gone back to being for Big Boys only

I should have qualified - my current gearing strategy is for heroic 5 mans.

Tanking heroic deadmines last night the number of "Hit/Miss/Parry/Dodge" messages I was getting on bosses was annoying me. But until the patch it was mainly just an annoyance. I'm still reluctant to reforge mastery or dodge/parry into Hit/Expertise. However, I think I will be spending a lot on expertise food/elixirs for a while

It'll depend on your healer, then. My tanks have "Real Tanking" sets and "Hit/Xpt cap" sets. I swap sets based on the healer -- when we're bringing a new alt or pugging something I'll try to make their lives easier; when it's a raid healer I'll try to give them something to do to keep them awake lest they succumb to narcolepsy.

I am definitely going to be running 5 mans with hit & expertise (soft) capped from now on. I may switch to survival gear for a particularly scarey boss, although at the moment I can't think of one that merits that. (The Commander at SFK was hitting like a beast last night, but even then, I'd rather be capped so as to better keep his adds on me).

It seemed to me last night that our dps has had a satisfying boost with the patch, although that will partly be because I was tanking in threat rather than survival gear. In fact, I think I was top of damage done after the heroic SFK run. Before the patch, switching the gear sets did not seem to bring a noticeable boost in dps.

I would never reforge mastery though and even my threat set has most items reforged into mastery (from avoidance).

Elixir of impossible accuracy and expertise food (plus putting an expertise gem into my new patch belt socket) takes me to around 7% hit and 21 expertise. Not at soft cap but seemed enough in heroic last night with dps doing 10k, I was doing 7k and holding threat fine – not too many miss/parry/dodges on bosses as before. So I won’t be reforging mastery, just spending lots on Elixirs.